Economic Report Summary

June 7, 2016

Last week, early on, there were several interesting, featured deals online.

The new, super-duper Intel Extreme i7-6950X came out for pre-order on NewEgg for about $1750. It has 10 cores at 3 GHz. Sounds like a thermal nightmare, but it’s only 140 watts, which isn’t so bad. Nevertheless, wouldn’t it be much more economically sound to get a 14-core Xeon 2Ghz server? Well, if you can afford this, it means you want the bleeding-est bleeding-edge you can possibly bleed.

There is even a motherboard combo for the hot new processor. MSI motherboard and 32 GB RAM is not bad.

Lower-end 6-core i7s were on sale between $450 and $650.

On the other hand, there was the ridiculously economical AMD-based FX-8300 Vishera combo, with a nice Gigabyte motherboard, 8-core (really just 4-cores, plus 4 digital processors that share the main cores’ floating point processors) 3.3-Ghz-equivalent processor that runs at a nicely efficient 95 watts (versus the older version that runs at 125 watts), and low-end 8 GB RAM. All for $220, less than half the price for a six-core i7. Just about the same price as a 14-core Xeon processor on Ebay.

Needed a fan to help cool your server room? Best Buy had a decent box fan for $13.

There was a decent MSI laptop with NVidia 950M GPU for less than $800 after a coupon code. Maybe even less than $700. Again, too little, too late.

Rosewill is really bringing a lot of stuff to the home electronics arena, and the holiday sale included a lot of it. Very nice.

On a personal note, debts are in control and income is stable, so that’s good.